This invention relates to ad hoc mobile wireless networks with high speed mobile transmitters.
Several techniques and numerous equipment arrangements have been used in the past to route data messages on the battlefield from a source to a destination. Many protocols exist which rely on accumulating knowledge of neighboring nodes and in part judging the quality of those neighboring nodes to be used to relay messages to a destination. Often the signal strength of the neighboring nodes is used to choose with which node to communicate. In mobile networks, the transmitters may be moving in all directions and at varying speeds. It is often necessary to increase the sample rate of ones neighbors to determine which node is best to use. When fighter aircraft are used as transmitter platforms, the sample rates need to be significantly increased owing to the rapid changes that occur in routing path availability. Also, each data packet could theoretically be appended with an additional data packet which provides the speed and direction of travel of the node.
While these methods are well known in the art, they have the following drawbacks. The increased sampling rate increases the overhead used to operate the network which thereby reduces the available capacity to transmit user message data. Or in the alternative, a lower sampling rate can be used but then either the availability or the stability of the system is degraded. The appended data packet with speed and direction of node travel information would further burden the system with more “overhead” data which either reduces the message capacity of the system or otherwise causes the same adverse affects as overloading the system.
Consequently, there exists a need for improvement in wireless ad hoc networks with high velocity, mobile transmitters.